Love Thy Neighbour

"Love Thy Neighbour" taught Jesus. What is the meaning of this ?
What is love ? Is love an act ? Love is a state of consciousness. Love is a state of being. Many actions can flow out of state of being - for example anger can trigger violence.

When Jesus says "Love Thy neighbour" is referring to action or a state of being? Answer which Jesus gives to Pharisees has some clues.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself."

So we should love Lord and love neighbour as ourselves. The difficulty is love being a state of being rather than doing. Mother loves a child because she is mother. Relationship develops love. Knowing the relationship with Lord develops love.

That leads us to the question what is our relationship to Lord ? View of Yoga in this matter is God/Ishwara is our innermost consciousness. Pure consciousness. Source of our existance.

Knowing God from Yogic point of view is knowing our self identity. Dropping all our false identity, personality and knowing ourtrue identity is the way. All beliefs,concepts about oneself, personality-everything is social conditioning. When we drop the conditioning, only pure awareness remains. That is our innermost controller, self. Only this realization leads to pure love for the Lord.

The statement makes more sense when we understand when Jesus says love your neighbour as yourself . Do we love ourself ? Do we accept ourselves with all the weakness and shortcomings we have ? To love ourselves, we need lot of deconditioning about concept of right and wrong imposed by the society. We need sincere repentance and dropping of the mask of personality.

When we do that, really we start loving ourselves and the Lord and offcourse neighbour. Here neighbour doesnot just mean neighbour. It means all human beings, all creation including even enemies as Jesus makes it clear in another place.

'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. (Matthew 5:43) .

So the path Jesus lays is very clear. Come to a stage of acceptance of yourself as you truly are. Then realize relationship between you and Lord. This will lead to transformation of your Being. Your being gets filled with love. That love will overflow to your friends and enemies.